Title: Impact of volume, routing and product mix flexibilities on the performance of a job shop: a simulation study

Authors: B. Shoban Babu, G. Srinivasan

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India. ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India

Abstract: In this paper, the impact of the factors batch size, setup times, priority dispatching of jobs, machine failures, rework, volume, routing and product flexibility on the performance of a job shop is studied. The performance of the simulation models are measured in four dimensions: mean flow time, average work-in process, percentage throughput of the shop and the percentage of jobs meeting their due dates. The simulation results show that routing flexibility and machine selection rules have significant impact on the system performance. It is also found that the system performance starts to deteriorate when the level of routing flexibility increases.

Keywords: flexible job shops; volume flexibility; routing flexibility; product mix flexibility; simulation; Taguchi methods; experimental design; job shop performance; batch size; setup times; priority dispatching; machine failure; rework; product flexibility; machine selection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJENM.2010.037930

International Journal of Enterprise Network Management, 2010 Vol.4 No.2, pp.107 - 135

Published online: 05 Jan 2011 *

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